Ask HN: Best place to learn about Mobile Development

[poppinphresh]

I'm really interested in learning about development for Windows Mobile. I have Visual Studio 08 and an HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6.1.

Up until this point I've been purely a web dev guy.. Mostly PHP, a little bit of ruby and python. What resources would you suggest?

[hwijaya]

There are so many ways of doing development for Windows Mobile. My own experience was developing it in Compact Framework. It's basically is a .NET Framework in slim version. It would be helpful if you know at least C# or VB.NET and some ideas on how the framework works. Have a look on this site below for some examples of apps develop using the framework. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa145791.aspx

Another route, I have met some people who do mobile development in C++ or wxWidgets. I think it's much steeper learning curve to jump from scripting language to there. Besides, I can't see any real benefit of going through that route UNLESS the apps that you want to develop requires an absolute level of performance. Otherwise, IMHO, the development time is not worth it.

Here are some URLs that might be helpful. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb158619.aspx http://www.wxwidgets.org/

Hope that helps. :)

[poppinphresh → hwijaya]

Awesome! Thanks for the links.

I was thinking about going the C# route, I don't think that anything I'd like to build would require the power of C++. Most of my ideas are just for simple apps. Maybe some location based features.. From what I've read C# should be able to handle that.

[hwijaya → poppinphresh]

It should. The commercial application (www.speedalert.com.au) that I was working on in C# back then was real-time system..and location based(GPS). The only differences I can find compare to C++ system was, the start-up time and the footprint of the app. Anyway, good luck! :)

[petercooper]

If possible, could you edit your post title to include "Windows" before "Mobile"? People might think to post iPhone related resources here (which is what I was going to do) and you seem to make it clear that's not what you want ;-)